Twitter ‘Favorites’ are probably the most underrated and most often forgotten feature that the social network has to offer. Like many of its features, however, it really leaves it up to you how you want to put them to good use. Most people seem to have opted for the ‘bookmarking’ route – keeping track of interesting links you want to read later in the day.

Whichever way you choose to use Twitter’s favorites, we’ve put together a list of tips and tools to get the most out of Twitter favorites. Bookmarking tweets is all good and well, but when you have a service which neatly indexes them and makes it easy to read all of the links and articles from one convenient location. Or if you’re using Twitter favorites as a way of keeping track of positive testimonials about your brand, we have a tip on how to put that content to good use.

To find out more about how you can get the mot out of Twitter’s favorites, read on.

Bookmarks

Using Kippt is the easiest way you can turn your Twitter favorites into the ultimate bookmarking machine. When I’m browsing Twitter on my phone, I can save stories I come across while on the go, and read later from the comfort of my browser using Kippt.

After signing up for a free account, you can grant it access to your Twitter account. Clicking on ‘Sync Apps‘, you’ll find that you can connect your Kippt account to several services including Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instapaper and more. For our purposes, you’ll only need to connect Kippt to your Twitter account.

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Once you’ve connected your accounts, be sure to turn the connection on, and any tweets you add to your favorites will automatically be stored in your Kippt account. While Kippt is a social bookmarking service, when it comes to the list of links you save through your Twitter favorites – it automatically defaults as a private list. You can always change the list’s settings and make it public if you want to.

When it comes to each link, Kippt gives you a way to share it back on Twitter, or other platforms, once you’ve had a chance to read the post. If you click on the ‘Add Comment’ link – a window will pop up.

From here you can share the link on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, and you can also easily save the link to Pocket, Instapaper or Readability.

Curated Content

While Twitter has made it harder to find RSS feeds for your Twitter activity, you can still access the feed to your favorites using the following link – just replace username with yours, or anyone else’s favorites you want to keep up with:

https://api.twitter.com/1/favorites.rss?screen_name=username

Now that you know how to access the RSS feed, there are several ways you can put this to good use. For your own favorites, you can automatically share that RSS feed on other services. By using the RSS feed as a selective distribution tool, your Twitter favorites become a set of links or tweets that you want to highlight, without them getting lost in the midst of your conversations and daily tweets on Twitter. You can put it in your blog’s sidebar using a basic RSS widget. You can use a service like RSS Graffiti or Buffer, to automatically shareDistributing Your Blog Content: The Best Auto-Posting ServicesDistributing Your Blog Content: The Best Auto-Posting ServicesAre you a blogger? What about a blogger of multiple blogs? If you have several blogs to share and all of the popular social networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to share them on, you...Read More your Twitter favorites with your Facebook or LinkedIn friends. You can even add it to your signature using a service like WiseStamp.

Don’t forget that you can actually access the RSS feed of anyone’s Twitter favorites, so when it comes to other people’s Twitter favorites, you can simply subscribe to their favorites in your RSS feed to keep up with the tweeps you know bookmark interesting content.

Testimonials

If you’re using Twitter as a marketing tool, you can use your Twitter favorites to save positive feedback you receive from other Twitter users. You can then direct others to your Twitter favorites as a page of testimonials about your product or service. There’s no reason you can’t also put the RSS feature to good use with this idea. You can share it on your site or blog using the RSS feed, or post it to your Facebook page using RSS Graffiti.

Some of the big brands, like Starbucks and Burberry are already putting this concept to good use.

Do you have any tips or tricks on how to put Twitter favorites to good use? Let us know about it in the comments.

Nancy is a writer and editor living in Washington DC. She was previously the Middle East editor at The Next Web and currently works at a DC-based think tank on communications and social media outreach.